fiction

creative non-fiction

Nathan Hauke

Bunny Scout triptych

ONE

Neighbors (2)

The neighbors are letting the boy
Stay alone in the trailer another dog
Sister gone to foster care
Home again now too?
Feral children isolated by
Three dysfunctional generations
Like a sun-bleached plastic Santa
Tangled in razor briar
Morbidly obese addict
Mom bipolar grandmother
Housebound great grandmother’s cats
Clawing dirty white curtains for daylight ///

TWO

3/28

Pits of
Your eyes

In the
Ultra

Sound
Edge of

Your ears
Swimming

Between
Two pulses

THREE

Triangles

Slanted across grubby tile
While cartoon rabbits try to earn Bunny Scout badges fishing at the laundry mat
Catch an old boot and cut to commercial magic happens
Colored sheets uneven momentum THUMPF(s)
Oval suds near an empty bag of Bugles
Ambient bleed of recess lighting above scooped sitting area
Where buds pattern mirror to garden a blank wall
Like a handsome grey rabbit laughs spinning in a tire swing
:: See you around, Max

Trying to

Push down anger
That shakes dirty foam in an eddy
How angry
Depends on the extent
To which we live
Hand to mouth it’s exhausting
To dream your animal face
Sweating behind the death mask
While bees crawl out around your collar
To be unrecognizable
To yourself friends

Voice
Like a boat radio
Mostly static
Moldered electrical wires
Below the helm
America: a vision
Where paint
Chips up off
The idea

Nathan Hauke is the author of Every Living One (Horse Less Press, 2015), In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes (Publication Studio, 2013), a collaborative talk about getting a small press off the ground in a rural community, entitled Country Music, that was written with his Ark Press co-editor Kirsten Jorgenson (DoubleCross Press Poetics of the Handmade series, 2013), and four chapbooks, most recently Pastoral (years later) (Shirt PocketPress, 2013). His poems have been anthologized in Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He has a Ph.D. from the University of Utah.